TV: ‘Last Man Standing’ has last laugh on critics

Guess what is shaping up as the biggest hit of the new TV season?

Tim Allen’s retro “manly man emasculated” sitcom, “Last Man Standing.”

TV critics loathed it — but 13.2 million viewers liked it. That’s TV’s biggest 8 p.m. comedy debut in more than seven years.

And the new 8 o’clock comedy opened on its own. No watch-us-kill-Charlie-Sheen-and-put-his-ashes-in-a-DustBuster lead-in audience of 30 million here!

Sure, you argue, that’s because people may love Tim Allen, but after they saw the first of the two back-to-back episodes ABC used to launch the series Tuesday night, ratings would —

Nope! The second episode copped more viewers than the first. That means people liked what they saw.

In “Last Man Standing,” Allen plays a guy living with his wife and three daughters. As if that’s not bad enough, he works for the catalogue of a sporting-goods retailer. For years, his character, Mike, was sent in to manly places to gin up sales imagery for such manly things as boots and tents and knives. But his boss decides that young guys don’t read print catalogues, so Mike finds himself working on the company’s newfangled, girl-y thing called a Web site.

All across America, we’re picturing millions of people in the show’s targeted demographic group — the put-upon-male — watching the unveiling of “Last Man” Tuesday night. Then, their wives/ girlfriends asked, “What are you laughing at?” and took a longer look — and decided they liked it, too. Because “Last Man” handily beat its series competition in its time slot among 18- to-34-year-old women.

The show was the No. 1 program in its hour, across the entire TV landscape, among 18- to-34-year-olds.

Yes, we know, CBS’s much-ballyhooed new sitcom, “2 Broke Girls” (from “Sex and the City’s” Michael Patrick King), attracted a bigger crowd of about 19 million to its unveiling — this season’s biggest new-series premiere to date.

But “Broke Girls” did so with the enormous help of a whopping “Two and a Half Men” lead-in audience of 30 million.

The only other new series to draw a bigger audience in its kickoff — the CBS drama “Unforgettable” — attracted   14 million people, with a  17 million-viewer hand from its “NCIS: Los Angeles” lead-in.

(“Last Man” finished virtually on par with the opening of CBS’s new J.J. Abrams drama, “Person of Interest,” which had attracted 13.3 million people in its first flight. The show ran in CBS’s best drama-series time slot, Thursday night at 9, with a sizable “Big Bang Theory” audience as its jump-start.)

We could go on and on about how “Last Man Standing” — the new series most hated by TV critics — trounced the openings of all those shows that TV-industry navel-gazers said would be The Next Big Thing: “Terra Nova” (9.2 million viewers), “The X Factor” (12.5 million), “Whitney” (7 million), blah, blah, blah.

Instead, we’ll finish with:

●In its review of “Last Man Standing,” the Los Angeles Times said: This “is a case of people who can make situation comedies with their eyes closed making one with their eyes closed.”